And then he was hauled out of the prison, taken to the Old Market and beheaded.
The execution was carried out in full view of the inhabitants of the city, and the Marshal and his suite, the Gonfaloniere della Giustizia Piero Soderini, many members of the Signoria and a large number of the nobility as well as da Vinci were also present. The sight of the surging populace, the glare of the polished armour in the brilliant sunlight, the awesome cape of the executioner, the flash of the sword, the riot of colours and human forms were truly inspiring. Leonardo alone regarded everything with indifference. Immediately after the execution he returned home and with a few strokes of the brush changed Gioconda’s smile. He stood all the while a little to the right of the picture, on the same spot where Bougainville had once stood when he was looking at it, and the eyes of the woman, turned slightly to the left, regarded him in the same way as they had Philippe de Bougainville. After Leonardo had worked on the picture a little longer the smile was transformed completely, and the artist said to himself that it was now perfect. It was totally enchanting, both mysterious and enigmatic; it was impossible to tell if she smiled at Bougainville or whether she was luring him into very heaven; no one could tell what it was she was smiling at.
The next day the Marshal pulled out of Florence and headed for Naples; however, the light-footed goddess of Victory eluded him, and in December 1503 he was beaten to destruction by the Spaniards at Consalvo.
It was rumoured that Leonardo had spent four more years ceaselessly working on La Gioconda; in truth however he merely sat before it and stared at it.
When he moved to Milan he took it with him; later he went with it to France, where he sold it to King Francis I for a large sum of gold. Since then it has been regarded as the most famous picture in the world, and is at present in Paris. There too no end of people fell in love with it; one idiot over-painted it and a certain Vincenzo Perrugia, a glazier, stole it and later gave it back in Florence, no one knows why. Attempts were made to associate it with a tedious love affair in which a real woman had played a part. But the real grounds for this have not come to light. Nor is it ever likely that they shall. No one ever knows the real grounds for anything.
It has also been claimed that the picture in the Louvre is not authentic, but a fake. However, one would have to have no understanding whatsoever of the colossal stature of the painter or of love itself to insist that this was in fact true.
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Pushkin Press
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Mona Lisa first published in German in 1937 as Mona Lisa
© Alexander Dreihann-Holenia 2015
Illustrations © Neil Gower 2015
English language translation © The Estate of Ignat Avsey, 2015
First published by Pushkin Press in 2015
ISBN 978 1 782272 06 9
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